'Um camarote para a CRIL': Suburban spaces and transculturality in Pedro Vieira's última paragem massamá

Abstract

This paper focuses on Lisbon's suburbs where people struggle during the economic crises. It discusses aspects of transculturality (Welsch) in Pedro Vieira's debut novel Última Paragem Massamá (2011) [Last Stop Massamá]. The novel describes Lisbon from a 'peripheral perspetive' (Ingenschay), setting the plot in the suburban areas of the Sintra train line, where the main character's suicide, a synecdoche of the Portuguese economic debacle in 2011, triggers a narrative of the lives or ordinary people sitting on the train which the suicide brings to a halt.